Google Seurat enables high-quality 3D graphics on mobile devices

Google’s Daydream experiences are based around a very simple design language. Using low-poly objects and floating planes, the company was able to deliver magical virtual experiences that could run acceptably on your mobile device. And while these experiences were cheery and fun in their own way, they weren’t able to replicate the realism you can achieve from high-end computer processing.

Google is looking to change that with the introduction of Google Seurat. Google Seurat can be used to take high-end 3D scenes from things like films and compress them to something easily processed by a mobile processor. Google used a scene from Lucasfilm’s Rogue One as an example,. and mentioned that something that took an hour to render on a high end-PC could now be rendered on a mobile device in just 13 milliseconds. Now that’s pretty cool.

To do this, Google reduces the texture size by 300x, and is able to reduce polygons in the scene by 1000x. How they’re able to do this and maintain that much cinematic quality is beyond me, but it could mean big things for studios who like to add extreme detail to their scenes and would still like to enable processing on mobile handsets.

Check out the video above to see how the team does it, and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.